here in death valley
by lead me to salvation
Summary: "When she finishes her song – one of the ones that's been drummed into her head ever since drama school, to be honest, she could sing it backwards half asleep – he's looking at her with this smile that makes her insides flip over themselves. She barely hears the applause. Not going to happen, she tells herself. Forget about it. " AU.


**A/N** _My next TSOM piece. Very AU, and not very Christmassy but Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to the lovely people at Proboards who have taken me under their wing :)_

The heat breaks over Maria's head and drips down her spine as she steps out of the trailer and into the dusty expanse of nothing. In the distance, beyond the perimeter fence she can see the scrubby trees spiking the morning on their branches and a herd of wildebeest idly grazing. There are people bustling around the set already, and she surreptitiously pinches herself, reassured when the nip of pain tells her that she is definitely not dreaming. This is real; the wind on her face, the smell of savannah, the camera hanging heavy from her shoulder.

"Maria!" a voice calls, and she blinks, like she always does. It's strange, getting ready to act out here in the open air. The closest she would've gotten to this back home would be a wind machine and a painted backdrop. "Director wants to see you!"

The runner-boy – Rolf, Maria thinks his name is – is pointing in the direction of the set. She smiles and gives him a thumbs up before heading out, pulling at her headscarf and trying to rub the sticky feel of the gloss from her lips. The sandy ground crunches under her costume boots as she heads over into the shade of the acacia tree the crew have set up under.

"Ah, here's our star," the director, Max, says, leaning back in his chair and pulling off his sunglasses. "Ready to get going, love?"

"Yep," Maria smiles.

"Will someone go and find Georg, please? He should've been here half an hour ago."

"No need," one of the crew points in the direction of the camp. Maria feels her heart squeeze. This is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. Why should she be nervous about this of all things? Of course she knows he's gorgeous and talented – she's seen The Captain just like everyone else on the planet – why should she let that bother her? Max cast her above seasoned actresses and he's been winning Oscars left right and centre for the last decade. He knows what he's doing and she's just got to trust in that.

She feels rather sees the shadow fall across her as Georg von Trapp falls into place next to her.

"Finally," Max grumbles.

"Sorry about that. You know what Elsa's like."

Maria fiddles with the end of her headscarf, and tries to stop the fear crawling up her throat. What if she's not good enough? Sure Max found her on Broadway, but this is so different, there's no orchestra pit between the audience and the actors, they're all going to be right there, filming her every move and mistake, all seeing eyes and judging little smiles…

"This is your lovely co-star, Maria Rainer. Maria, may I introduce Georg von Trapp?"

Maria forces herself to turn towards him and smile, lifting her chin. His dark eyes fix on her, sharp, stern, and she suddenly feels like a prize idiot. "It's lovely to meet you," she says, her voice as even as she can make it.

"Shall we get started?" he asks, turning away. She tries to ignore the sting his bored tone sends flying into her.

~o~

He can't deny that she's good. Up until now, he couldn't believe that Max had cast a complete unknown, a little musical theatre actress, in the leading role of the biggest blockbuster of the year, but now he sees it as she filters a sad smile through her lashes at him, and delivers her line, flipping through the images on her camera as she turns away.

"Don't you think it's good to get away, to photograph something else for a change?" he asks, putting his hands on the curve of her tiny waist. She leans back against him, holding the camera to her eye. He can smell the sunshine in her hair, sunshine and sweat and flowers, so different to Elsa's musky hundred-pound perfume that she chokes him with every morning as she gets dressed.

"It's beautiful," she says, staring out past the crew, the lighting man. "But it doesn't feel real, Lachlan. Not after everything."

"You miss risking your life?"

"I miss telling the truth to a world that wants to see the pretty lies."

He presses his lips to her the top of her head. He can feel the tension in her body and briefly regrets his moment of rudeness earlier. It was uncalled for, he knows it, but there's something in those deep drowning brown eyes that reminds him of Agathe. He doesn't even know what, only that it was enough to send his carefully constructed shields crashing back up.

"You're an incredible woman, you know that?"

"Not incredible. Just determined."

"Cut!" Max calls from the behind the camera. Maria steps out of his arms like she's been burned. "That was very sweet you two, but I think you actually need to kiss her, Georg. More _passion_."

He stifles a sigh. "Okay."

"Do the two of you need five minutes?"

"Nah, we're good," Maria calls, her voice full of forced lightness.

They hang around, awkwardly avoiding eye contact. _Stop this,_ he thinks sternly to himself, just catching his eyes from sliding over her face for the hundredth time this morning. Her cheeks are tinted pink, and her braid is dishevelled – they'd done away with that light silk headscarf after Max saw what her hair looked like in the sharp Tanzanian sun – and he's not sure what to think about having to kiss her. He's kissed lots of people in his time – girlfriends _(stopgaps)_ , one-night stands _(smiling eyes to help him forget)_ , actresses on camera and off, attractive people, completely unattractive people, a man for one of his films – but apart from his wife, there's never been anyone that makes him feel like this, unsure and angry and _maybealmost_ guilty.

"And action!"

The scene is perfect. She turns to face him halfway through and he drops his forehead against hers. "You're an incredible woman, you know that?"

"Not incredible. Just determined."

~o~

Maria feels as though she's fallen off a cliff. Her heart is pounding and her head is singing and oh god, she never realised that kissing was supposed to be like this.

"Cut!" she hears Max through the daze in her head, and every so gently Georg von Trapp pulls away from her. He looks as dazed as she feels, and after a second he shakes his head and straightens up properly. Max's smile is bright enough to start a fire. "That's a wrap!"

Maria pushes her camera back onto her shoulder, and steps away from him. "I guess I'll see you this afternoon."

"Well, you can come to lunch with me if you want to meet some of the rest of the cast?" He's not quite smiling, but there's approval in the way he looks at her.

"Okay."

This, she thinks, is their beginning.

~o~

Elsa looks the girl up and down as Georg leads her to a seat under the awning, both carrying trays from the food trailer. Messy braid, tanned skin, bright smile. "Hello, darling," she purrs. "Who's this?"

"Maria," Georg says in his irritating way. "This is Elsa Schraeder. She's playing my wife. Elsa, this is Maria Rainer who is playing Anouk Horsfall."

"Oh," Elsa lets her eyes widen in false surprise. "Did you have a good scene this morning?"

The girl, Maria, blushes and Georg shrugs, noncommittal, sitting down beside her. Elsa snakes an arm around him, pretending not to notice the way he stiffens. "Max seemed happy."

"That's good. It's lovely to meet you, Maria. What have you been in? I don't think I've heard your name before."

"Max found me on Broadway," Maria says. "I was in An American in Paris."

"How charming, don't you think Georg?"

He doesn't look up from his food. "Very. So you must sing and dance, too?"

"Yes. I went to ballet school as a child and…"

"Well, you'll have to come and meet my children when we're back in New York. My eldest wants to go into musical theatre."

Elsa looks between the two of them, trying not to let the betrayal show on her face. She's never met his children, and she's known him for twenty-odd years, she was there to pick up the pieces when his wife died, all the newspapers ask him when he's going to marry her and he has the nerve to invite this little girl to the home in the countryside that he's never once mentioned to her! Maria is pleased, she can see that much, from her blush and her small, understated smile. The girl twists the end of the braid around her finger.

"I'd like that very much. Thank you, Georg."

The two share a look that Elsa doesn't like at all, and then Georg stands, letting her arm fall off his shoulders. "See you later, Elsa. We had better get going."

~o~

They've been in Tanzania for two weeks by the time Georg and Max manage to twist her arm into singing for them.

"I tell you, she's incredible," Max is saying around the campfire one evening, slightly tipsy on the success of the shoot and the warm beer in his hand. "I never knew that such a little slip of a girl could have such a magnificent voice."

"Show us?" Georg says. Maria looks up from where she's been tuning her guitar.

"Now?"

"Why not?"

"Uh…alright…"

The firelight reflects off the blunt lines of his face, and she feels a burning, wanting ache in her stomach. Max has managed to put a couple more kisses into the script, but Maria knows she shouldn't expect anything in real life. For Christ's Sake, Elsa clings onto him like an anemone on a rock, poisonous and beautiful – they're obviously an item, the way they retire to the same tent every night, the way she looks at him…except he never looks back the same way. Not quite.

When she finishes her song – one of the ones that's been drummed into her head ever since drama school, to be honest, she could sing it backwards half asleep – he's looking at her with this smile that makes her insides flip over themselves. She barely hears the applause. _Not going to happen,_ she tells herself. _Forget about it._

~o~

One night when she's just come in from one of the final scenes out here, Elsa is waiting for her, wrapped in a white silky robe with her hair piled on top of her head, looking glamourous and perfect. Maria feels dirty in comparison, still in her costume with sand under her nails and grimy, greasy hair. "How can I help you?" she asks, wishing the woman would just leave.

"You do realise that there's nothing more irresistible to a man than a woman who is in love with him?"

"Excuse me?"

"I see the way the two of you look at each other. But he'll get over you soon enough. He always does."

It's as though someone has driven a ten-tonne bin lorry onto her chest. Maria can barely breathe. "What do you mean?"

"He always comes back to _me_. There's a reason he's going to ask me to marry him, you know."

"I don't know what you want from me," she manages to get out past the lump in her throat.

"Just bear it in mind, sweetheart. We'll see you in the morning."

~o~

Landing back in New York City is like a plane-crash – cinders in her mouth whenever she thinks about what Elsa said and burning embers in her veins when she lies in bed late at night with his face imprinted on the backs of her eyelids.

"You've been avoiding me." He sneaks up behind her on the last day of filming, and she jumps, her heart rising up her throat.

"No, I haven't."

"Well, it doesn't matter. Would you like to come out to New Jersey to meet the children?"

Maria cannot say no.

~o~

Somewhere in the background, she can hear Elsa cooing over the house – _how beautiful it is, Georg, why did you never bring me here before_ – but for once, she doesn't care. One look at the children is all it takes, lined up in height order with sad, expressionless faces and matching clothes. Things like this don't belong in the twenty-first century – what is Georg thinking? It's not the Victorian era for heaven's sake!

"You have a guitar?" the eldest, Liesl, asks, approaching her cautiously with the littlest on her hip.

"Didn't your father tell you? I was a musical theatre actress before Max snatched me up for his film."

It's exactly the right thing to say. The children are crowding around her, demanding a performance, and that's when Maria falls in love. She'll talk with him. For their sake, she has to.

~o~

"So, what do you think?"

She is sitting with Georg out on the terrace, watching how the starlight drips onto the paving stones and trying to ignore the Amazonian swallowtail butterflies fluttering around her stomach.

"Your children are lovely."

"I'm not sure how you can say that," he grimaces, swirling his brandy glass. "They can be right little demons. They've scared away more nannies than I can count."

"I think they miss you."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know what's happened in your past and I don't want to know, but they're so sad, Georg, can't you see that?"

He stands up, all of a sudden. "I don't want to hear this Maria."

It feels as though she's turning to lead but she makes herself go on. Be brave, that's what the Mother Abbess at her school always used to say to them. Someone who stands by and does nothing is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates a wrong. "But you have to! I've only been here a day and around you they're just, I don't know, marching machines and…"

"Maria…"

"They're so lovely, they really are, and they adore you, they honestly do, they just want you to love them back!"

"Not another word!" In the six months she's been filming with him, she's never seen him this angry. It pours off the set of his shoulders like a waterfall, splashing into the air around him. "Don't lecture me about my family." His tone is dangerous.

"I'm not sorry for saying those things. I gather from Liesl it's about time someone did."

He turns away, fists clenched. She reaches out to touch his shoulder, gently. "I'll say goodnight."

~o~

It's been a long time since anyone's made him feel that way. The guilt puddles about his feet as he stands, holding onto the railing of his terrace and listening to Maria's fairy-soft footsteps fade away, the creak of the French windows as she goes inside. She's right, he knows she is. He just hates that it had to be her to call him out on it, to sit there calmly whilst all his defences and excuses and reasons crumbled into dust. He's been a shit father to the children since Agathe died. He knows this like he knows his own name, and it makes him want to cry for the first time in five years. He's let them down so badly. If only he knew how to make it up to them.

When he eventually goes inside, the children are all in the kitchen in the basement, eating ice-cream and singing along to the Taylor Swift song Maria is playing on her guitar. He stands and watches them for a second until Maria notices him. Her voice falters, and Liesl looks around.

"I was wondering if you all wanted a story before bedtime?" he asks, trying to mask the nervous tremble of his voice.

Seven pairs of eyes look at him for a second and then Gretl has launched herself into his arms, and suddenly all of them are piling on top of him and he's torn between laughing and crying again because how could he ever have been a big enough fool to give all this up?

~o~

A week turns into a month. Maria knows that she should really get a move on, get back out to auditions and find some work but she finds herself dragging her heels at the von Trapp mansion, loathe to leave Georg and the children.

"When are you heading back into the city?" Elsa asks, tilting her head coquettishly one evening at dinner.

"Uh…"

"Maria has agreed to stay here until the premiere to give Liesl some singing lessons," Georg interjects smoothly. "Isn't that right?"

Maria finds herself nodding. Elsa sends her a narrow-eyed, jealous look and turns away. Georg winks at her across the table.

~o~

"Father says that we're hosting the after-party for the premiere," Liesl says one night after the lesson that Maria has started giving now that it's her excuse for staying.

"Oh, that's nice."

"What are you wearing?"

"Oh, I have a pretty dress from Macys that I wore after my debut…what's the matter?"

"Maria…" The exasperation shows on Liesl's face. "Come upstairs with me and we'll see what we can find."

~o~

The noise, when she steps out of the limousine and onto the red carpet is like nothing she's ever heard before in her life. She and Georg are giants on the side of the building. She remembers taking that shot for the poster, laughing with him about the safari they'd been on earlier with their arms wrapped around each other until Max told them to _be serious for Christ's sake._

Georg is waiting for her with Elsa clinging onto his arm as usual, but when he sees her, he prises Elsa's fingers off and makes his way towards her through the fog of noise and flashbulbs. "You look stunning," he says, his voice low as he kisses her cheek and taking her arm. "Is that…"

"Liesl gave it to me," she fiddles with her bracelet. "I know it was your wife's but Liesl said you…"

"I don't mind. It suits you."

"Thanks," she manages a smile back. "God, this is terrifying."

"Enjoy it," his breath whispers against her ear. Elsa is watching them with cat-slit eyes. "It's all for you."

~o~

"Elsa, can you tell us about your relationship with Georg von Trapp?" The cameras flash, the microphone is in her face. All she can think about is the way Georg and Maria looked, arm-in-arm as if nothing was more natural.

"Well, don't you know? We're going to be married."

~o~

As soon as it's over, Maria runs. It's all she can think to do. Married. He's going to marry Elsa. Why did she think that the fairytale could end any differently?

~o~

After a few days, she drags herself back to the von Trapp mansion. She has to pick up her things, she reasons, her guitar, her songbooks. Say goodbye to the children. It was lovely whilst it lasted, but they'll have a new mother soon. She'll just go back to theatre, sink back into the ocean like seafoam, and remember this as her taste of infinity.

The house is beautiful in the weak sunlight and before she even makes it to the front step, the children have come screaming though the door and nearly knocked her over. "Maria!" Friedrich exclaims. "We missed you!"

"Don't ever leave again!" Marta demands, fisting her hands in the material of Maria's skirt.

"I'm sorry, Marta, but I've only come to collect my things. I wouldn't want to get in your father and Elsa's way."

"Elsa?" Louisa shakes her blonde head. "She's gone, Maria. She left right after the party and she never came back."

"What? I thought she and your father were getting engaged…I…"

"Not anymore." The voice makes her blood come scalding into her cheeks. She looks up, with Gretl on her hip and the children gathered around her, and he's standing there, just like he did on that first day, with no expression on his face. "Children, Mrs Schmidt has cooked lunch for you. Maria and I will only be a moment."

They murmur and go back inside, dragging their feet and looking over their shoulder. When they've gone, he sighs. "Maria," he says, softly, coming down the steps.

"So…you and Elsa aren't…"

He takes her hands, and to his utter surprise she doesn't pull away. He wouldn't blame her, after all of this. "Elsa and I were never a thing."

She gives him a freezing stare and he sighs. "Alright, we were. It wasn't anything much more than friends with benefits. I never felt for her the way…"

"The way?"

"The way I feel for you. Maria…"

"Don't say anything else," she tells him, rising up on her tiptoes and kissing him. It's surprising and wonderful and so much better than the stage kisses because this time it's real, it's Georg and Maria rather than Anouk and Lachlan and all he can think about is sunshine and sweat and flowers and about how he never, ever wants to let her go.

 **A/N** _So the title is supposed to be the title of the film, and just if you're interested it's kind of inspired by the one that will be coming out about Lynsey Addario, who's a war photographer, and also thanks to kzaf for pointing out that I should say this is also inspired by the gorgeous visuals in Taylor Swift's Wildest Dreams video. Please leave a review, I'd love to hear what you think._


End file.
